Neon and Ghosts Signs

Rialto release their first new album in 24 years, Neon and Ghost Signs via Fierce Panda Records. In this sordid clubland mode, Neon and Ghost Signs opens with “No One Leaves This Discoteque Alive”. Eliot casting himself as “the hound of London town, where the sheets are stained with gold” in a lascivious Brel growl, out to “lose my head” and find love “in a perfect storm”. It’s a nocturnal party prowl that the album pursues with a passion. Their reunion was spurred on not so much by a longing for the past as an urgency to grab the best of life while they can. Six years ago, while holidaying in Spain, singer and songwriter Louis Eliot was rushed to hospital for extreme emergency surgery, mere hours from death. His full recovery was an epiphany. “What you might think is if you have a very close to death experience you want to start looking after yourself,” he says. “I just went chasing full speed after my youth. I was just like, fuck it, I might not be here next week, I’m just going to dive in.” Part of Eliot’s rebirth involved leaving behind a long-term relationship to immerse himself once more in London’s late-night party scene. Part of it was the romance and anguish he found there. And part of it was realizing that the songs that were emerging from this period – songs of love and loss, hedonism and regret, set in wistful witching hours – were a call from the past. Rialto were a chart-topping, double-Platinum success in SE Asia and a highly acclaimed cult concern in the UK, but undoubtedly a band ahead of their aesthetic time. Following a second album Night on Earth in 2001, the band split and Eliot spread his wings. He became a regular collaborator with Grace Jones and Supergrass’s Danny Goffey; as a songwriter, his credits included the Ivor Novello-winning ‘Leave Right Now’ for Will Young; he released a 2004 solo album and “a very rural sounding record” as Louis Eliot And The Embers in 2010, and developed the 8,000 capacity Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall.